Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Starfleet Academy’s Gay Klingon Could’ve Been Epic

By

On March 25, 2026

14 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

Forewarned: this is culture war stuff. So, if you trigger easily: don’t read this. Then again, you’ll be missing out on some excellent counterintuitive culture war rabble-rousing.

I guess I ought to declare right here and now before I get trounced for being an out of touch GenXer neobigot. So, say it with me, loud and clear: I’m for every human on this planet being treated with the innate dignity they possess and deserve and that they not be denied the rights their ancestors fought so hard for. Rights are not entitlements, they are earned. And much of humanity has, in the past, earned them and passed them down. They should not be denied to anyone.

Now that my virtue signaling is out of the way I can move on to some cultural war criticism.

First, why must a gay man be portrayed as simpering and overly sensitive? Why does this portrayal as queens persist in pretty much all visual media? And FFS, folks, don’t get all sensitive, I’m going somewhere awesome with this.

Why not portray a gay man very much in touch with his masculinity? Need a few historical examples of powerful, masculine gay men that changed the world?

Easy-peasy. First, Alexander the Great and his lover Hephastion. If you disagree, because Iskander has to be a man’s man, well, fuck off. It’s historically inaccurate to believe otherwise. Seriously, the Greeks buggered each other left and right and all were married. Then there is the Prussian King, Frederick the Great, who out maneuvered the armies of Maria “Always Weeping, always Annexing” Theresa of Austria at almost every turn? Both men were as gay as Freddy Mercury, and both were indomitable warriors and strategic geniuses par excellence.

So, when Starfleet Academy wrote in a gay Klingon, I confess, my interest was piqued. The Kurtzman era franchise had a chance to change in a new powerfully positive way. But, the show-runners took the easier, softer way.

For real, they just turned down the wrong alleyway.

See, fiction has rules. You create species or characters and portray them a certain ways; they have to obey their own rules of internal logic. That way the reader or viewer knows what to expect. When a character or species acts contrary to canon, the reader and the viewer are not only confused but lose interest. So, what happened with the gay Klingon?

Let’s discuss Klingons in general first, okay?

Klingons, in case you don’t know, are fierce warriors, poets, singers and deeply, deeply romantic. Klingons are the antithesis of brooding self-actualized pansies, looking for closure or healing. They love killing almost as much as they love dying. “It is a good day to die,” is their constant refrain. And bloodwine? They make the Russians look like pikers when it comes to imbibing alcohol. So, would it not make sense that a gay Klingon ought to have been written in character? To write a gay Klingon any other way than as an awesome bad-ass killing, drinking and fucking machine is to fundamentally misunderstand Klingons and their crucial role in the Star Trek canon.

Let’s take Worf, from TNG and Deep Space 9, as an example. If Worf wanted to fuck another male Klingon, Worf’s idea of foreplay would have been sparring with bat’leths, followed by bending his paramour over a barrel of blood wine, blowing his load, screaming a blood-curdling Klingon scream and then a blood-wine toast, ending with a little spooning and a love poem.

You know I am right.

A gay Klingon could have been immortal. A gay Klingon had the potential to be Star Trek’s equivalent of a honey badger: he don’t give a fuck. A gay Klingon Dahar master? Dip me in a vat of melted cellophane!

Kurtzman and crew had the chance to create an immortal, utterly amazing Klingon in the mold of Alexander the Great or Frederick of Prussia. Instead they opted to tick off the wokester checklist with an absolutely pathetic, weepy, whingy, sniveling crybaby of a Klingon

What a waste.

The Kurtzman iteration of Star Trek has been nothing but failure after failure to understand what Star Trek was. It was never, ever true to Gene Roddenberry’s vision.

The franchise needs a fifteen year rest.

I’ll be ready for a do over in my late sixties. Get it fucking right next time.

What Phase Three of the Credit Cycle Looks Like: the Ponzi Scheme Visualized

By

On March 25, 2026

2 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

Courtest my alma mater Morgan Stanley, we have this graphic that perfectly depicts what the AI-Ponzi scheme looks like and just how incestuous it truly is:

Is any other comment necessary?

Pro Iran War Propaganda Videos

By

On March 25, 2026

24 Comments

Of all the wars I’ve covered in my writing career, this one has been the hardest in the sense that figuring out what’s true and what isn’t is difficult. The baseline assumption is that nothing the US says about the war can be trusted. Most of what Iran says in concrete terms about what they fired and hit can be trusted. AI images and video have proliferated, so the old “show me picture” routine doesn’t work unless y0u’re a good image analyst and willing to spend hours. Trump, of course, lies about everything. Iranian official media exists, but it’s often censored by the West so reading their official statements is often difficult.

All that said, I think it’s time for something different: a collection of propaganda videos that are Pro-Iranian. Because of all the above, it’s unclear to me if these are official, but they’re interesting nonetheless.

The first appears to be official, was published by Russian “news” outfit RT, and makes the ethical case:


Iranian underwater drones:


This one made me laugh:

And the Korroamshahr-4 missile:

More serious posts next, though the third video is actually a pretty accurate summary of Iranian war efforts so far.

Everyone reads these article for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Shockwaves From The Second Iranian American War

By

On March 24, 2026

30 Comments

Some of the issues from the Iranian war are obvious: everyone’s talking about oil and natural gas, for example. Many have mentioned fertilizer. But I think it’s worth going into in a bit more depth.

First is that in addition to gasoline, oil is used to make bunker fuel (98% of freighters and tankers), jet fuel, and diesel (heavy machinery, large trucks.) The prices for all three are rising faster than gasoline prices and there will be a worldwide shortage. Production of semiconductors, phones and so on will shut down some time after that, depending on how the small reserves available are shared out. Taiwan is particularly vulnerable and production can be expected shut down in a couple weeks.

The chart below is from six days ago:

Don’t take the above chart too seriously, I’ve heard different numbers from different sources, and the type of oil in reserve matters a LOT.

This will, of course, hit the AI Bros hard. They have significant stockpiles of some of what they need, but not everything. Worried about that data center coming to where you live? If you’re lucky, Iran has just saved you from an AI driven spike in your energy prices, but not an oil shortage spike!

Airlines are already reducing flights. Expect prices for travel to spike significantly. If you don’t already have tickets for a trip get them now. Even so, it wouldn’t surprise me if many already booked flights are cancelled without recourse, citing forece majeur. Diesel and bunker oil shortages will mean supply line disruptions, and primary processing disruptions. Fertilizer shortages are already changing planting decisions, farmers in Australia are planning on planting much less wheat, for example.

Oil goes into a lot of things. Here are a couple of graphics showing some of them:

And,

To oversimplify, pretty much everything has some oil in it. For example I’m stocking up on NSAIDs and Tylenol 2s (legal in Canada.) I saw one person saying they went out and bought about a year’s supply of pretty much everything which can be stored. One side benefit may be that insane levels of plastic packaging might, at least, be reduced.

China’s bunkering up. No refined oil products are being allowed for export. Fortunately for China, they, unlike apparently almost every other nation in the world, are not run by retards, so they have massive petroleum reserves and they bought about 50% of the world’s grain production for the last four years and stored much of it. But this goes far beyond petrochem: they produce, for example, almost all of the world’s tungsten, and no more exports of that.

Stockpiles in the the West are essentially at zero, right now, and yes, most advanced weapons cannot be made without Tungsten.

There’s been a crash in silver prices recently. You may have read about it. But here’s the thing, there’s an actual physical shortage of it because it’s used in essentially all electronics, including semiconductors and even more importantly, solar panels. Everyone’s going to want solar panels now.

China, not being fools, are no longer allowing export of silver because they know it’s the physical shortage that matters, not the paper price on paper exchanges where delivery isn’t expected to happen.

I spent years railing that just-in-time logistics was sheer fucking insanity and should be outlawed. In addition every country who isn’t a net producer should have at least year’s stockpile of fuel and even net producers should have three years of food stored (because things like droughts and fertilizer shortages happen.) Medication and key medical goods should also be stockpiled. A lot of people are going to suffer and die when key drugs hit shortage and many cancer drugs, for example, are produced in India and on top of the factories not being able to operate without energy, many drugs use petrochemical derivatives directly.

This war should never have happened. Even if it ended now there would be serious shortages for about four to five months, and it would be three to four years before full production could be resumed, if it can be. (Shutting down oil and gas well production often damages the underlying fields.)

Oh, and which major nations will suffer the least? Russia and China. It is to laugh.

I know this is the second article on this subject in a few days, but the impacts of the war are important for you to understand.

Everyone reads these article for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

On the Necessity of Facing Nuclear Reality, Even When a Child

By

On March 23, 2026

21 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

In 1983 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock clocked in at 3 minutes to midnight. America was in the middle of one of the most dangerous five year periods of the Cold War. Detente was dead. Able Archer exercises occurred that November. KAL-Flight 007 was shot down by the Soviets on September 1, 1983. And a newly assertive America under Reagan got busy stationing 103 Pershing II Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles in West Germany to counter hitherto deployed Soviet SS-20 Saber IRBMs. Dialogue between the two superpowers came to an icy halt.

In the middle of this complex realpolitik the Nuclear Freeze Movement in the US gained steam, throwing their support behind Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro’s nod to run against the Gipper in 1984 and the American millitary buildup continued at a frenetic pace.

Meanwhile, back on the farm, so to speak, something earth-shattering (at least to me) was fixing to be broadcast on November 20, 1983 on ABC: The Day After. An American media attempt to depict the aftermath of a full-on thermonuclear exchange between the USSR and the USA.

Jason Robards-who I always confused with George Peppard of A-Team fame—was the central character. A small town doctor out of his depth treating increasingly desperate radiation-sick patients from all over. I recall one scene, a kind of town meeting, where one woman, wearing a white dress, bled from between her legs, obviously from a critical lack of feminine hygeine producuts. And I recall someone needed to travel to the Bay Area, which once he arrived saw that it was totally obliterated.

I was horrified. My Mom was genuinely worried about me. That film represented my political baptism by fire. Henceforward, I watched the nightly national news like a child obsessed. I followed the course of the Cold War with interest and obvious worry that one Sunday morning—I don’t know why it was always a Sunday—I’d be vaporized along with my little sister and Mom. As I grew older I matured. I viewed the nightly national news with a bit more sophistication. I began reading the national news rags. Remember Time and Newsweek? I devoured them. I recall vividly Cori Aquino’s Revolution in the Philippines and Ortega’s ouster by Violetta Chamorro in Nicararagua. But I never, ever forgot the lessons of The Day After:

Risk peaks when one feels absolutely certain and safe. This is when calamity strikes.

Risk feels at its greatest after calamity passes and one feels chastened.

~attributed to Jesse Livermore

Anyone have a clue where the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock rests today?

89 seconds to midnight. Arms control be damned. ‘Murican don’t give a shit.

The entire arms control regime brought into life by Reagan and Gorbachev, extended by Bush and Baker, followed by the sage, bipartisan Nunn-Lugar Act and Clinton’s negotiating of the START Treaty have all been cast aside. First, by George W. Bush’s hamfisted and stupid abrogation of the arms control regime’s lynchpin: the 1972 ABM Treaty. Followed by Trump letting the INF lapse. And finally, this February, once again, irresponsibly letting the START Treaty lapse.

With the War in Iran not going well, China has taken to using proxies to warn Israel of the cost of using nuclear weapons against Iran:

“the moment Israel uses a nuclear warhead against any country, it will be considered the number one enemy of humanity, it will be the demise of Israel as a state, as a regime, as a country.”

Explicit but utilizing an indirect conduit, as one would expect of the Chinese.

Not to be deterred, American policy-makers lauched their own trial balloon in favor of an Israeli first-strike.

Yes, people, we’re that close.

But here’s the absolute shit-kicker, as we say down here in South Texas: the depiction of the aftermath of global thermonuclear war in The Day After is weak compared to the UK film on the same subject, dated 1984, called Threads.

American movies require a happy ending. Always. And The Day After offers up a milquetoast version of positive.

Not so Threads. And for that fact alone, Threads, horrifying in the extreme—mind you, I watched it as an adult—is the more realistic film, and its depiction of the civilization ending effects of thermonuclear warfare will leave you chilled to the bone. Threads is a much more effective admonitory tale of the very real risks we’re shopping off as I type.

America’s Economic Future: Imminent Pain and Dislocation Not Seen Since the ’30s

By

On March 23, 2026

20 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

The end of this credit cycle is going to include the following macro events: a credit crisis, a housing crisis, an energy shock, with the potential for massive failed deliveries necessary to third world nations creating famine on a biblical scale, at least one Too Big To Fail failing, as Lehman Bros and AIG did in 2008, and the AI bubble bust. All of these will happen. Locked in. Fixed. No way out.

In a previous post I outlined the order in which the financial catastrophe barreling down on us like oncoming freight will occur. I’ve simply included one new variable: the energy shock.

Here’s how it’ll go down.

First, there is an expansion. Stocks rise. At some point the rise becomes divorced from realistic earnings expectations. This is when intense speculation drives equities into bubble territory. After all, Nvidia’s market cap is just shy of ($4.2trillion) the annual GDP of India ($4.4trillion) as of Monday March 23, 2026. Simultaneously, US Treasury buyers, ‘prudent’ investors, qualified investors (people with more than $5 million in net worth), pension funds, insurance and re-insurance companies and good old orphans and widows, as they always do, got a bit jealous and so reached for yield. They wanted safety with high returns. But in this world you can have safe or you can have high returns. You’re a fool to think you can get both at the same time; alas we have a superabundance of fools these days.

So just like in 2007-08, the shadow banking system, ie. the issuers of supposedly safe and high yielding assets, called subprime loans, experienced serious losses, that lead to the unwinding phase of the financial crisis. The 2008 fin crisis started on a lovely summer day in NYC, June 22 2007—I think the Yankees won that day—when two Bear Stearns subprime hedge funs went belly up. This was 2008’s canary in the coal mine.

This time around it isn’t subprime that has precipitated the unwind but the dominance of private equity/private credit shadow banks, such as Blue Owl, Blackstone, Blackrock, and others.

As previously noted, the current crisis’ canary in the coal mine was Blue Owl. Their very rude wake up call arrived in the form of $1.4 bn in redemption demands, which forced Blue Owl to sell assets to meet redemption needs. It was a catastrophe for Blue Owl, in every way a fire sale in which every Wall Street trader exacted his pound of flesh. It also led to a very ugly unravelling of contracts with Oracle. Oracle’ stock plummeted.

Many others have followed in the weeks since Blue Owl burped up a massive fur ball. The specifics can be found in this post and are beyond the scope of this discussion. They are pertinent, but listing them would make this a Tolstoyian endeavor. The upshot is this: normally, an enormous amount of credit destruction (read, debt) has to happen until we get to phase three of the credit cycle. One counterintuitive effect: a stronger dollar. We’re already seeing this versus the other major fiat currencies.

Moving on to one of the other developments I outlined in the first paragraph: a housing crisis. Home building has long been the foundation of the American economy. It’s in serious stress right now. As I mentioned before, last month saw a full -17.6% collapse in the purchase of new homes. In the Northeast it was an epic cow patty catastrophe: -44%. In my hometown, sellers outstrip buyers buy a full 114%. This in the heart of the ‘Texas miracle.’ I honestly don’t know how a collapse in homebuilding will effect this economy coupled with the headwinds it’s facing. I know it won’t be salutary and will exacerbate already dangerous liquidity and solvency issues caused by the private credit/private debt unwind. What else? “Cannot say. Saying, I would know. Do not know, so cannot say.” Five bucks to whoever gets that reference.

Will the Fed be able to contain both? FuckifIknow?

Adding to fierce headwinds, Trump’s war against Iran has had a similar effect on the global economy as Odysseus ill-timed opening of Aeolus’s wind bag: it’s blown us on a completely fucktarded vector, beyond any rational goal, that will take five years-at a minimum-to recover from if we stop now. Plenty of us predicted this but we’re just dipshits sitting in the basement wearing our jammies. If the Israeli’s continue their wanton destruction of everything, there is no telling how Iran will respond. And I’m not even pondering nukes here.

The effects the closure of the Straits of Hormuz are and will continue to have on the global economy, rather the effects faced by the Rules Based Order the West imposed on much of the globe will be make the European energy crisis look like a night out with Sidney Sweeney.

One effect: potential famine in those third world countries-on a biblical scale-unable to import desperately needed fertilizer from the Persian Gulf at reasonable prices.

Second, no helium. Helium is a gas essential to modern industrial life, everywhere.

Third, my best friend in Denmark joked, “hell, we might soon be back on bikes eating only porridge for dinner.” He also rued the demise of Nordstream and said, unequivocally that Danish renewables won’t be enough. This from the one European nation with the largest sector of renewables. Imagine the second order effects cascading out across the globe?

And what about the cost of transport? Not just everywhere, but especially here in the US? Anyone given any thought to just how super human stupid just in time delivery looks now? I’ve always warned about this. You know: chickens, roosting; shit like that.

Fuck it. I’ve got more than ten years of Wall Street experience so what the hell do I know?

Well, I know this as I know the sun rises in the East and sets in the West: the exogenous shock waves rippling towards the US economy are bad. Vewwy, vewwy bad. And there is no double-slilt experiement available to cancel out the oncoming waves.

What next?

Oh yeah: Too Big To Fail. Nope. Stress test? Are you Dave Chapelle?

Just ask Lehman Bros or AIG. This time around one of the Too Big To Fail institutions will fail. Maybe more than one. If I had my choice it would be Goldman, but if I am being realistic I’d put odds on Wells Fargo and/or Citigroup. Why? Well, Wells Fargo has a history of laundering tons of cartel cash, so no real culture of compliance/risk management. Citigroup has brazenly challenged the SEC to regulate them on multiple occasions. Those would be my two choices.

Finally, I’ll recap phase three of the credit cycle: the Ponzi unwind. As I wrote here,

“Crypto will be the first big Ponzi unwind. And it will take a lot of suckers with it. Plus, a damn lot of fools who worked for investment, commercial banks and private credit/equity shops. Crypto is bullshit, wrapped in dead fish skin that’s been perfumed by Chanel. No matter how good it smells, it’s rotten to the core. Crypto is to this financial crisis as CDOs and synthetic CDOs were to 2008.”

Moroever,

“The AI-hyperscalers will suffer as well, during the Ponzi unwind. Why? They are in essence engaging in a similar sort of vendor financing like CISCO and Juniper Networks did in the dot-com bubble. Nvidia is giving chips to AI-hyperscalers as collateral for loans. Never mind the chips will depreciate long before the earnings are solid enough for the AI-hyperscalers to payback the “loans.”

It’s accounting legerdemain in extremis.

So, to be clear: multiple endogenous-domestic-headwinds coupled with very ugly exogenous-international-shocks, real and potential, increase the odds, hourly, that we’re nearing financial armageddon.

To recount what to expect: a housing crisis, a credit crisis, an energy-shock, fertilizer shortages leading to potential famine, one or two Too Big To Fail, failing and the AI bubble bursting. All at the same time. Same time. Boom. Boom. Boom.

This ain’t gonna resemble your daddy’s financial crisis. In the words of Grunge’s greatest lyricist, Chris Cornell, “I’m feeling California, but looking Minnesota.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 22, 2026

By

On March 22, 2026

28 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 22, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

War

Beijing to Tel-Aviv and Washington: “Israel will cease to exist the moment it uses a nuclear weapon!”

Dimitris Konstantakopoulos, 20/03/2026 [defenddemocracy.press]

In the following paper, we will present the reasons why a nuclear war in the Middle East is now quite possible, the deterrent intervention of China which interrupted a period of dangerous tolerance of Israel by the great powers, and the relationship between what is happening in West Asia and what is happening around Ukraine and the American continent, particularly in Cuba….

These statements, and most likely the information it possesses, provoked an unofficial but very harsh statement from Beijing. This is the first time a major power has interrupted the unprecedented tolerance enjoyed by Israel and its lobbies, a tolerance that has now led humanity to the brink of the abyss.

…Specifically, Victor Gao, vice-president of the Chinese Institute for China and Globalization, when asked what the two nuclear powers, Russia and China, would do if Israel used nuclear weapons, he stated to the American The Cradle, that “the moment Israel uses a nuclear warhead against any country, it will be considered the number one enemy of humanity, it will be the demise of Israel as a state, as a regime, as a country.” He simultaneously warned Prime Minister Netanyahu, the government of Israel, and its armed forces that they will be considered enemies of humanity and responsible for whatever happens, in an indirect but clear reference to the Nuremberg trials that judged the Nazi leaders. Mr. Gao made it clear that what he says does not concern condemnatory statements but an advance notice of actions. He congratulated Mr. Trump on his statement that Israel will not use nuclear weapons and expressed the wish that he acts effectively in this direction.

Mr. Gao adds that any use of nuclear weapons by Israel will lead to an explosive proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East and their use would result in hundreds of millions of deaths and the transformation of the entire region into an uninhabitable zone.

Mr. Gao makes also a reference to the Epstein archives.

The Chinese warning has been phrased in a… Chinese way. Mr. Gao is the head of a small party allied with the Communist Party and holds no government position, so the responsibility for his statement cannot be directly attributed to the Chinese leadership or the CCP. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that it constitutes an unofficial but authoritative expression of the Chinese position on the matter. And to leave us in no doubt on the issue, the Chinese Academy distributed this specific excerpt of Gao’s statements under the characteristic title “What would China do if Israel dropped a nuclear weapon?”….

IDF threatens ‘elimination’ for Russian leaders who ‘wish Israel ill’

Wyatt Reed, Mar 19, 2026 [defenddemocracy.press]

Israel’s veiled threat to Moscow came just after Russian media warned traffic cameras in Moscow were vulnerable to the same exploits that Israel reportedly used to monitor Ayatollah Khamenei’s residence before assassinating him.

Breaking the Nuclear Taboo

Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolić Hughes, March 13, 2026 [defenddemocracy.press]

…It would be the ultimate expression of Trump’s unbounded power for him to break the one remaining international taboo – which, despite far too many close calls, has persisted for more than 80 years – detonating a nuclear weapon. There are many indications that, despite the U.S. and Israel’s ability to bomb Iran at will, this war may not be going well for them. But that need not be the pretext for using a nuclear weapon. In Trump’s mind, the more unprovoked, outrageous, and unnecessary something is, the better. Given his fragile ego and rapidly deteriorating mental powers – going off on bizarre rants about poisonous snakes in Peru or the White House drapes – the more unhinged he is, the more he thinks it demonstrates his dominance.

Since the end of the Cold War, many people who pay attention have worried about an accidental or a miscalculated stumble into nuclear war. But with Trump breaking every taboo domestically and internationally, demonstrating that he is above the law and can do as he pleases at every turn, the ultimate taboo waiting to be broken is the nuclear one….

[TW: I wonder if there will be a mass resignation of military officers as Trump stumbles aver closer to using nuclear weapons. But they would lose their pensions. So, probably secret approaches to some (anti)Republican Senators and Congressmen begging for Congress to do something? And if Trump does issue orders to use nuclear weapons, would military officers refuse? Might they even demand Trump be arrested? Trump and Hegseth have pissed all over the Code of Conduct numerous times — Hegseth this past week, by declaring “no quarter” toward Iran, explicitly violated violated the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996, and the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual. The commander in chief and the top civilian official at the Department of Defense should also be subject to the Code.]

Remember the Titan: The Fragility of Trump’s Golden Egg

Jim Stewartson, Mar 18, 2026 [MindWar]

GRAPH: Trump’s Pathologies

…While I hesitate to bring up the dreaded notion of bipartisanship, the best way to try to prevent the explosive scenario, to try and contain the criticality when it happens, is for the political system to present a combined show of force that draws a red line before it happens.

If he’s not given a sandbox to play in, Trump will take the entire playground.

For example, if the Democrats and 20 GOP Senators could find a way to agree publicly that if Trump engages in a preemptive nuclear strike for any reason without consulting Congress, he will be impeached and removed immediately. Even if he was not considering such a strike, just the statement would make clear to him that he is not, in fact, omnipotent….

The South Pars Pulse: Why the ‘Energy War’ is Actually a Thermodynamic Singularity 

[The Ultimate Avatar of Balance, via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]

…By treating the destruction of the world’s largest natural gas reservoir merely as a ‘supply chain disruption’, the geopolitical establishment is exhibiting a fatal, terminal blindness. We are no longer dealing with economics; we are dealing with physics.

The strike on South Pars is not an ‘energy war’. It is an unmodelled Thermodynamic Pulse that threatens to liquidate the biological carrying capacity of the entire Persian Gulf.

The Methane Blind Spot

South Pars/North Dome holds an estimated 1,800 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. When upstream infrastructure of this magnitude is ruptured, the result is not just fire and smoke (particulate matter), which the environmental NGOs are currently monitoring. The far greater threat is uncontained venting of raw methane (CH4).

Methane possesses a Global Warming Potential (GWP) roughly 80 times that of CO2 over a 20-year horizon. However, in the immediate aftermath of a massive, concentrated release, the ‘horizon’ is not 20 years. It is measured in weeks….

Trump says he’s ‘not afraid’ of Vietnam-style ground combat in Iran 

[Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism 03-18-2025]

…Speaking from the Oval Office alongside Ireland’s Taoiseach, Micheal Martin, the President fielded many questions about the Iran war.

‘Are you afraid that if you put boots on the ground in Iran, it could be another Vietnam?’ one reporter asked.

‘No,’ Trump shot back, adding, ‘I’m not afraid of anything.’

The Geopolitical Consequences of Defeat

[Policy Tensor, via Naked Capitalism 03-16-2025]

…The only way in which the United States can evade outright defeat is by suppressing and degrading Iran’s ability to hold gulf assets at high levels of risk and keep Hormuz closed.1 If the US cannot, through either the direct application of force or indirectly through military coercion, accomplish this strategic objective, the outcome will be indistinguishable from strategic defeat, even if the war ends in a ceasefire, for then Iran would’ve demonstrated for all to see that the United States does not, in fact, have the military means to impose its will on the gulf.

This means that the dynamics of the interdiction campaign are decisive.

If the interdiction campaign rapidly degrades Iran’s ability to attack gulf assets, that would still not guarantee victory, however. For victory requires the further success of countermining operations if the Iranians mine the gulf, as they have reportedly started doing. Countermining operations are not a solved military problem either. At the very least, they will also take many months. What is clear is that, a successful prosecution of the interdiction campaign to conclusion is a necessary condition for effective countermining operations….

Burning the Lifeboats to Keep the Lights On 

[The Ultimate Avatar of Balance, via Naked Capitalism 03-16-2025]

… something important needs saying: the US’s totally aimless campaign of wanton and indiscriminate destruction in Iran is definitionally tantamount to terrorism. An operation requires a stated strategic objective to qualify as a “war” or military action of some sort, legitimate or not. Trump’s clumsy bomb-fest—during which he proudly boasts he can “bomb” certain Iranian targets “for fun”—does not fit that description, and as such definitionally qualifies as a campaign of terrorism against a sovereign state and its civilian population. Let’s not even mention what the US is currently doing to Cuba, with the blockade having collapsed the nation’s entire electric grid as of yesterday.

The closest the US has come to stated goals in this debacle in fact align with definitional terrorism: the US wants to create economic hardship and infrastructural pain in the country which would spur the populace into overthrowing “the regime”….

 

Things Go Haywire as Israeli Escalation Throws Iran Conflict into Dangerous New Phase 

[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]

Things really hit the fan earlier today after Iran’s largest natural gas field, the South Pars, was struck by Israel. This field reportedly accounts for 75% of Iran’s natural gas production and 80-85% of its electric grid….

 

Read More

Open Thread

By

On March 21, 2026

26 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Page 13 of 515

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén